In most of the works which make any mention of railway transportation it is stated that the second quarter of the last century was a period of exceeding activity, and that between the financial crisis of 1837 and 1857 the foundations of the American railroad system were securely laid. Occasionally this statement is supported with maps and tables purporting to show when and where the earliest lines of the system were established. But it takes only a brief examination of these to learn, that few attempts have been made to authenticate the figures. It would be dangerous to say that no accurate railroad maps exist for the period before the civil war, but it is certain that none such are in frequent use.

It is particularly true that the railroads of the Old Northwest await their historian. For even the most commonplace facts concerning these the investigator must go to scattered, incomplete, and inaccurate sources, which, at best, are to be found in only a few of the greatest libraries. To remedy this defect has been the attempt of a group of students in the University of Wisconsin, who have recently gathered and systematized much of the material necessary for a statement of the annual railroad construction in the Old Northwest before the civil war. [Lillian E. Cook, Helen Freer, Andrew E. Hansen, and John W. Rodewald, in History 21, First Semester, 1910-11.] The results of their work have aided in the preparation of a series of maps and tables, from which a few preliminary generalizations may be drawn.

The most important compilation. of statistics of railway construction in the United States is to be found in the fourth volume of the Census of 1880. Prior to this report, the Census had made little effort to reduce railway facts to a statistical basis, and even now it found it necessary to resort to legal proceedings, or admonitions through the United States District Attorney, in order to persuade certain of the railroads to contribute their answers to the questionnaires of the bureau. [Tenth Census, 1880, Transportation Volume, 3.] The reluctance of the companies to reveal the facts of their history throws some doubt upon the accuracy, of the tables thus obtained, but the Census was at last able to publish, in 1883, an elaborate volume on the construction and operation of American railroads. In this volume are to be found schedules which give for each road the amount of mileage built in each year from 1830 to 1879. The totals of construction thus obtained are not far from the fact, yet the figures are so arranged that considerable skill and foreknowledge are required for their reading. The inveterate tendency of railways to reorganize and change their names makes it difficult to identify single lines. And since only the mileage of each year is given, without reference to terminal points, the figures are useless for geographical reference. Thus, the mileage given for the Illinois Central Railway,—1852, 14m.; 1853, 117m.; 1854, 294.75m.; 1855, 202.47m.; 1856, 77.28m.,—conveys no idea of the facts of construction from three or four points, in as many directions, and of the closing up of gaps in 1855 and 1856. [Tenth Census, 1880, Transportation Volume, 359.]

The tables prepared for the Tenth Census have been the basis of most of the statements recently made respecting the ante-bellum railways of the United States. They were, in part, reprinted in 1888 by J. L. Ringwalt, editor of the Railway World, in a popular illustrated compilation which is often cited as though it possessed an independent value as a source. [Ringwalt, J. L., Development of Transportation Systems in the United States, (Philadelphia, 1888).] It is, however, only an aggravating mixture of railway journalism and census statistics, which is confusing at best, and fails to answer the questions respecting the actual locations of the pioneer systems, east or west. Much more scholarly than Ringwalt was Henry V. Poor, whose long experience as editor of the American Railroad Journal [For several years prior to 1860, the American Railroad Journal published, in its first number for January, a table of existing mileage, tabulated by states] had specially qualified him to write the intelligent "Sketch of the Rise and Progress of the International Improvements, and of the Internal Commerce, of the United States," in the introduction to his fourteenth annual Manual of the Railroads o f the United States. [Poor, H. V., Manual of the Railroads of the United States for 1881…… Fourteenth Annual Number (New York, 1881). Henry V. Poor became editor of the American Railroad Journal in 1849. This periodical had been started as a weekly in 1832 by D. K. Minor, and was now continued by Poor until 1862. The outgrowth of his editorial experience was the announcement by Poor of his intention to publish a history of American railways. In 1860 he published Vol. I of his "History of Railroads and Canals of the United States of America," covering the New England and Middle States. The second Volume on the South, and the third, on the West, failed to appear, and Poor did not revert to his main intention until 1868 when he brought out the first of the annual volumes which are still continued under his name. He was born in 1812 and died in 1905.] But although here, as throughout the other volumes of the Manual he gave many figures of construction, he failed to present a comprehensive view of the whole subject.

In the absence of compilations showing the geographic background of railroad extension, it has been necessary to go directly to detailed local sources for the history of the railways of the Old Northwest. Most valuable of all these is the file of the American Railroad Journal, whose editor read with care the newspapers of the United States, and clipped from them fragmentary paragraphs from which can be assembled contemporary evidence for the construction of nearly every railroad of the United States. The indexes to the Journal are so imperfect that it has often been necessary to turn the pages of volume after volume, but the facts desired have generally been found. Not only local accounts of building and opening are found here, but large numbers of railroad reports are reprinted in full or in digest.

Next to the continuous file of the American Railroad Journal,, come the actual annual reports of the presidents and directors of the several companies. The burden of making detailed reports rested so lightly upon the souls of these officials that it was frequently neglected, or undertaken without enthusiasm. Railroading was regarded as private business, and the public was to be taken into the managers' confidence only when such frankness appeared likely, to further the, business of the company. Yet enough of the reports exist to be of great aid in establishing the dates for the opening of specific sections. The James J. Hill Collection of the University of Wisconsin is specially rich in ephemeral literature of this sort, and has been drawn upon constantly.

About 1850 there had been built enough railways in the United States to necessitate the inauguration of another variety of source material of high value. The American Railway Guide [Published in New York by Dinsmore and Co. There was already in existence a "Pathfinder Railway Guide for the New England States," but the advance of construction had now made a national guide both possible and necessary. Cf. Hunt's Merchants' Magazine, XXII, 683] began its monthly issues in this year, and since its value to the purchaser depended entirely upon its fidelity in describing actual running arrangements, its time-tables have been of great use in confirming other sources in their statements of operation. Unfortunately the number of copies that escaped destruction is small.

From yet another point of view, the local newspapers and county histories have been full of useful detail in verification. The railroad companies often advertised in the papers, while these printed news items on the facts of operation. The writers .for the innumerable county histories, that ripened during the eighties to adorn the parlor table of every rural household, almost always mention the date when the first train ran into the county seat, and often describe the ensuing celebration in some detail. In at least one case the wreck of an early excursion train called forth a monument of historical evidence upon the completion of a new through line. [This occurred in the autumn of 1859, when the Chicago and Northwestern had opened its line from Chicago, by way of Janesville and Fond du Lac, to Oshkosh. Hist. of Winnebago Co., Wisconsin, (Oshkosh, Allen and Hicks, 1880), 146; Hist. of Fond du Lac Co., Wisconsin, (Chicago, Western Hist. Co., 1880), 437; Fond du Lac Commonweath, Nov. 2, 1859; New York Tribune, Nov. 5, 1859.]

From these diverse sources, checked up by the tables of the Tenth Census, it has been possible to construct a history of railroad building for the five states northwest of the Ohio River, which is believed to be more accurate than any other that is now accessible. The facts involved lend themselves most readily to presentation in the form of maps, and annual tables. Most of the labor has been statistical, seeking its reward in the accuracy of its results. Yet its utilitarian character has not prevented it from, throwing new light upon many of the political and economic problems of the Old Northwest in the two decades before the civil war. Transportation, after all, has determined both the course and the period of western development; and in no section of the continent has this determination been more nearly absolute than in the region between the Ohio River and the lakes. [It is said that 49 counties in Illinois, through which the Illinois Central ran, increased in population from 351,887 in 1850 to 1,127,087 in 1865. Flint. H. M., Railroads of the U. S., 320.]

Railroad Map—1848

Where the earliest railroad of the West was built, and when its wheels first rumbled in their precarious attempt to keep upon the flimsy tracks, is yet a matter of unimportant antiquarian controversy. In 1838 there were at least five projects far enough along to boast of actual operation. In 1837, there is sure proof of only one, the Erie and Kalamazoo, [This was chartered as a Michigan road before the boundary controversy placed Toledo in Ohio. Its locomotive, the "Adrian No. 1," of which a cut is often printed, arrived at Toledo in June, 1837. A few miles were used as a horse road in 1836. Wing, T. E., Hist. of Monroe Co., Mich., (N. Y., 1890), 216: Knapp, H. S., Hist. of the Maumee Valley (Toledo, 1872), 551, 624; Howe H., Hist. Coll. of Ohio, (Ohio Centennial Ed., 1891), II, 412] which was built and opened from Toledo to Adrian, and was contemplating further construction towards the western side of Michigan. [One local writer insists that a locomotive was run from Sandusky to Bellevue over the track of the Lake Erie and Mad River Ry., in 1837; and that the Sandusky and Mansfield Ry., was operated by horsepower, over wooden rails, to Monroeville, in the same year. Hist. of Erie Co., Ohio, (Syracuse, D. Mason and Co., 1889), 266, 268.] There are rumors of a tram-track earlier than this, in eastern Indiana, [At Shelbyville, where a horse-power, wooden tramway is said to have been used on July 4, 1834. Hist. of Shelby Co., Indiana, (Chicago, Brant and Fuller, 1887), 286; Cottman, G. S., Internal Improvements in Indiana, in Ind. Quart, Mag. of Hist., III, 152] and of a coal road in western Illinois, [Gov. Reynolds claimed to have helped to build six miles of wooden railway from his coal mine to the Mississippi opposite St. Louis, in 1837. Reynolds, J., My own Times, (Illinois, 1855), 503; Tanner, H. S., Descr. of the Canals and Railroads of the U. S., (New York, 1840), 197; Hist. of St. Clair Co., Illinois, (Phila., Brink, McDonough and Co., 1881), 32] but if such existed at all they were no part of any continuous organic life. How rapidly these roads might have developed under the enthusiastic guidance of youthful promoters and complaisant legislatures cannot be said with certainty, since the financial storm, which had been brewing ever since General Jackson began to utter executive menaces against the Bank, broke upon the United States in the spring of 1837, to depress the whole country and check the development of the West. As active agencies in transportation, railways did not exist in the Old Northwest until the Mexican war was over. The lines undertaken between 1835 and 1847 are to be regarded as pioneer enterprises conceived in poverty and inexperience, prostrated by general bankruptcy, and revived only in another decade.

Railroad Map—1849

By the end of 1847, there were 3205.70 miles [Tenth Census, 1880, Transportation Volume, 309. According to these tables the mileage of the five northwestern states was 613.85, whereas my own tables give 660. The difference is due to the failure of the Census to mention the Lake Erie and Mad River Ry., which was in operation from Sandusky to Bellefontaine, Ohio, and to the fact that it credits the Sandusky, Mansfield, and Newark Ry., which actually operated only 56 miles to Mansfield, with 116.25 miles. I am unable to verify this mileage allowed to the S., M., & N] of railroad in the United States, of which 660 were operating in the Old Northwest,—or ought to have been if none of them had been worn out or washed away by the last spring flood. Each western road stood for an ideal which had not yet reached fulfillment. No lines connected the waters of the lakes with any part of the Ohio River. The nearest approach to a complete line was in Indiana, where from Madison, on the Ohio, the earliest Hoosier railroad ran to Indianapolis. It had taken seven laborious years to build, and when its first train steamed into the capital, in 1847, carrying an itinerant circus in addition to its hilarious excursionists, the celebration had been enthusiastic. [Sulgrove, B. R., Hist. of Indianapolis land Marion County, (Phila., 1884), 135.] But north of Indianapolis there was no continuation of the road. The counties along the Wabash canal were still dependent upon trail and country road for their connection with the southern portion of the state.

The Madison and Indianapolis was one of two local roads touching the Ohio in 1847. The other had been started into the back country from Cincinnati, winding its way along the Little Miami River, from which it derived its name, to Xenia and Springfield. [Hunt's Merchants' Magazine, XXIV, 640; Niles' Register LXXV, 310.] To meet these feelers from the south, a larger group of railway arms extended from the north. At four points below Lake Huron,—Detroit, Monroe, Toledo, and Sandusky,—six lines of track had begun to penetrate Michigan and Ohio, and had advanced, by the end of 1847, to Pontiac, Kalamazoo, Tecumseh, Hillsdale, Bellefontaine, and Mansfield. The only other railroad in the Old Northwest was in Illinois, where the abandoned Northern Cross, from Meredosia to Springfield, was a monument to the misguided enthusiasm of a youthful state. [Hist. of Sangamon Co., Illinois, (Chicago, Inter-State Pub. Co., 1881), I. 145; Hist of Vermilion Co., Ill., (Chicago, Hill and Iddings, 1880), 351; Carter, C. F., When Railroads were New, (N. Y., Henry Holt and Co., 1909), 186; McConnell, G. M., Recollections of the Northern Cross Railroad, in III. State Hist. Library Pub., XIII, 145. Its condition in 1843 is described by an emigrant to Iowa. Iowa Historical Record, XIII, 40.] In 1847, no rival had come to end the fifteen years of uncontested supremacy enjoyed by the Ohio Canal. The pioneer period of the railways was indeed nearing its close, but the remarkable changes of the next ten years were beyond prophecy.

In a large proportion of cases railway construction began at points already well established in trade or industry; and advanced to the unknown from the known. An apparent exception to this rule is the line which commenced its track at Meredosia, on the Illinois River, and headed for Springfield, in Sangamon County. Neither of its terminals was a place of any consequence, and the latter had only just succeeded Vandalia as capital of the state. The whole scheme was a piece of economic log-rolling, but the fact that supplies could be brought to Meredosia by river steamers determined the point at which construction should begin. In other cases initial points were of greater importance. Cleveland, Sandusky, Toledo, Monroe, and Detroit were well-known stopping places for the commerce of the lakes. Cleveland had the Ohio Canal, and was slow to go in for railroads, while the other ports were stimulated in their activity by her prosperity. [Cf. Oberholtzer, R. P., Life of Jay Cooke, I, 25.] Cincinnati had wide business connections before she undertook the Little Miami; [Taft, Alphonso, A Lecture on Cincinnati and her Railroads, (Cincinnati, D. Anderson, 1850) 1] further down the Ohio a series of river landings had hopes of coming first into the field and monopolizing the internal trade of Indiana. The older inland towns, in many, cases, influenced the route of the pioneer roads. Villages springing up along the National Road, or the Ohio or Miama Canal, became easy objectives or starting points for new schemes. Indianapolis was an artificial center, but she did not begin her complex of radiating lines until the Madison and Indianapolis had made it possible to deliver Ohio River freights to her warehouses. In Illinois, LaSalle, head of navigation on the Illinois River, and outlet of the Illinois and Michigan Canal, was regarded as a future railroad center before the canal had ripened into the condition of a practicable scheme.

The periods of canal and railroad dominance overlapped in the Old Northwest, and by their overlapping affected the development of both agencies of transportation. In 1825, DeWitt Clinton had not only opened his Erie Canal, but had given aid and comfort to schemes for feeder canals throughout the West. Ohio had undertaken two complete systems, the Ohio Canal, [Morris, C. N., Internal Improvements in Ohio, in Papers of the American Historical Association, III; Ohio Arch. and Hist. Soc., History of the Ohio Canals] reaching from Cleveland to Portsmouth, and open in 1832, and the Miami Canal, which was so extended as to afford a water route from Cincinnati to Toledo by 1845. Indiana had projected her Wabash Canal, [Denton, E. J., Wabash Trade Route, in Johns Hopkins Univ. Studies, XXI. Details of the opening with the oration of Gen. Cass, are in Niles' Register, LXIV, 276, 343, 345, 378-381] and opened it from Toledo to Logansport in 1843. Illinois, under the same stimulus, completed her canal from Chicago to LaSalle in 1848.[Putnam, J. W., Econ. Hist. of the Illinois and Michigan Canal, in Journal of Political Economy, XVII; Greene, E. B., and Thompson, C. M., Governors' Letterbooks, 1840-1853, in Ill. State Hist. Lib. Coll., VII.] For none of these canals was the period of ascendancy long. The Wabash Canal was paralleled by a railway in 1856. In six years after the Illinois Canal was opened competing railroads had been run from Chicago to both Alton and Rock Island, on the Mississippi. While in the year of the Illinois Canal, 1848, the pioneer period of railroad construction came to an end in the completion of a line across Ohio which destroyed all hopes for an important future for the Ohio canals.

The canal systems, the earliest efforts of the Northwest to improve upon the routes of nature, failed to receive fair trial. It had been promised for them that they would force the commerce of the Mississippi to run up hill, [Cf. De Dow's Review, X, 442: "The Wabash and Erie Canal is stretching its line down the banks of the Wabash, and, as fast as it extends itself, it sweeps the whole products of the valley up the river, against its natural current, to the Eastern markets, by way of the Lakes"] but they ceased to command the interest of the West before they were completed. The railroad not only overtook, but passed and left them; far behind. In the autumn of. 1848, when troops for Oregon service were being moved from New York to Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis, Niles' Register commented upon the new record of eight days which they made. By steamboat, canal, and lake steamer they were taken to Sandusky; thence, by the new railroad to Urbana, where a march of only fourteen miles enabled them to reach the northern end of the Little Miami Railroad, which speedily carried them to Cincinnati and the river boat upon which they completed their journey to St. Louis. [Niles Register, LXXIV, 191, Sept. 20, 1848.] Before the end of the year the gap which separated the ends of these roads was closed, and through service by rail was inaugurated from Lake Erie to the Ohio. [Annual Report of the Mad River and Lake Erie Railroad, Jan. 19, 1849, pp. 1-8; Hist. of Logan Co., Ohio, (Chicago, O. L. Baskin and Co., 1880), 289; Hist of Champaign Co., Ohio, (Chicago, W. H. Beers and Co., 1881), 274; Poor, H. V., Manual of Railroads, for 1884, 705.] It is an interesting coincidence that in this year, so momentous in the fate of western commerce, the city which was to rise from insignificance because of the new order pushed its first track to the Des Plaines River and ran the first locomotive out of Chicago. [Second Annual Report of the Galena and Chicago Union Railroad, Apr. 5, 1849.; Church, C. A., Hist. of Rockford and Winnebago Co., Illinois, (Rockford, W. P. Lamb, 1900), 271. The locomotive, "Pioneer," which is mentioned here, is on exhibition in the Field Columbian Museum, Chicago.]

Railroad Map—1850

Every year after 1848 saw new railroads undertaken and existing projects hurried to completion. The Northwest was in the swirl of a railway fever that unsettled financial conditions in all of western Europe, and had its pioneers in America with eyes fixed upon the commerce of the Pacific and the engineering conquest of the Rockies. Not every section, however, had it in itself to acquire in a short ten years a complete system of lines, extending from border to border, and changing the whole outlook of social and economic life.

Before 1848, the line of the old National Road, from Wheeling to Columbus, Indianapolis, Vandalia, and St. Louis, split the five northwestern states into uneven halves of discordant social tone. [Flint, H. M., Railroads of the United States; their History and Statistics, (Philadelphia, John E. Potter and Co., 1868), 239.] The southern half was reached by navigable streams tributary to the Ohio River. It had been peopled by the rush of pioneers in the years following the war of 1812. The parents of many of its citizens were from the Blue Grass or the Tennessee. Their parents, in turn, had come from Old Dominion or Carolina, bringing from tidewater the ideals of the southern states. The southern element in the Scioto Valley had been a permanent factor in the politics of Ohio. In Indiana, the struggle for slavery had been tense for nearly two decades. In Illinois, the inhabitants of "Egypt" never lost hope of. winning their state for slavery until 1824. The southern counties of the Old Northwest were never unanimous for slavery, but they were thoroughly impregnated with the ideals of the South before the northern tiers of counties had been surveyed or cleared of Indians.

North of the National Road, roughly speaking, was the zone of the Erie Canal. [Mathews, L. K., Expansion of New England, (Boston and N. Y., Houghton Mifflin Co., 1909).] After 1825, in increasing volume, emigrants from New York and New England flooded the Lake shores. The Ohio Valley was well started before the growth began, but by 1840 a new New England stood rival to a northern South within the three oldest states of the Old Northwest. For another twenty years, from the election of Harrison to that of Lincoln, the political future of the section was indeterminate. With two great classes of inhabitants, possessing different ancestry and divergent trade,—for the one did business in New Orleans and the other in New York,—it was too much to ask that a homogeneous population should have appeared at once. But when the civil war came to test the temper of the Northwest, it uncovered the amazing change that two decades had wrought. The hopes of the confederacy to carry the Ohio Valley with the Mississippi were frustrated, and the activity of Copperheads in Indiana and Ohio could not conceal the fact that in the Northwest were the foundations of the Union's strength.

The growth of this sentiment of nationality in the Northwest is still under investigation. It has indeed been shown that the attitude of the Ohio Valley did much to fix the outcome of the civil war. [Fish, C. R., The Decision of the Ohio Valley, in Am. Rep. Am Hist. Assn., 1910.] But the attitude of the Valley was itself largely determined by its commercial cities which were units in an economic organization that bound the right bank of the Ohio to the Lakes. Where the Lake district, with its New England population went, the northern half of the Ohio Valley had to follow. Artificial bonds had created an economic section out of portions of two great river valleys. Geographic sectionalism was weakening before the hand of man, and in the railway systems which were created between 1848 and 1860 may probably be found the key to the later history of the Northwest.

The opening of the through line between Cincinnati and Sandusky, in 1848, was the initial step in the process of binding the Ohio Valley to the Lakes. In 1849, the most important track that was opened completed a road between Detroit and New Buffalo on Lake Michigan. The old state railroads of Michigan, undertaken lavishly in 1837, had built, collapsed, and passed into private hands which now hurried both the Central and Southern lines towards Chicago. Chicago was all but reached in 1849, yet the accomplishment was deferred until 1852, while neither 1849 or 1850 witnessed the closing in of any gaps. Profuse local building, had begun, however, as is shown by the lines pushing from Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, and Chicago into their tributary agricultural areas. By 1851, Cleveland was in communication with Pittsburg, by way of Alliance, and with Cincinnati, by way of Columbus; Milwaukee had begun to build towards Madison and Prairie du Chien; while below Cincinnati on the Ohio railways actually started inland from Madison, Jeffersonville, and New Albany, and were projected from Lawrenceburg, Evansville, and Cairo.

Railroad Map—1851

In 1852, the advancing ends of track began to meet. Chicago was reached almost simultaneously by both the Michigan roads, [Indiana, interested in the future of Indianapolis, obstructed the entry of the Michigan roads into Chicago. Finally the Michigan Central crossed Indiana on tracks built by the New Albany and Salem, while the Michigan Southern used the tracks of the Northern Indiana. The former used the Chicago terminal facilities of the Illinois Central; the latter those of the Chicago and Rock Island. American Railroad Journal, XXV, 295, 343; Poor's Manual, 1884, 560; Farmer, S., Hist. of Detroit and Michigan, (Detroit, 1884), 899; Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway System and Representative Employees, (Biographical Pub. Co., 1900), 32] while the Ohio lines and their extensions not only entered Indianapolis but penetrated beyond to the Wabash River at Lafayette and Terre Haute. By the end of another season, (1858), there were seven railroads which radiated from Indianapolis and gave her abundant trade routes to southern Indiana and Ohio as well as to Chicago. The Chicago connection is typical of most of the through lines of the early fifties. Three companies were concerned in it. From; Indianapolis to Lafayette, one road was used. From Lafayette to Michigan City the traveler passed over the tracks of a second, the New Albany and Salem; while he entered Chicago from. Michigan City, in the cars of the Michigan Central. Already some beginnings in railroad consolidation had been made, but the typical company of this period was a local concern that depended on its connecting neighbors for through service. The public was too glad to get carried to its destination to worry over frequent changes of cars.

Railroad Map—1852

An examination of the map for 1853 discloses the great steps towards adequate communication that had been taken in Ohio and Indiana. Railroads skirted the whole southern shore of Lake Erie [Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway System and Representative Employees, (Biog. Pub. Co., 1900)] and from Cleveland and Sandusky, on the northeast, to Dayton, Cincinnati, and Indianapolis, on the southwest, stretched what was already an intricate network of tracks. Illinois, however, remained largely dependent upon the future, with beginnings of lines penetrating the northern, counties to the boundary of Wisconsin, but without a road in operation south of a line that could be drawn from Alton, through Springfield and Bloomington to Kankakee.

On the next three maps, for 1854, 1855, and 1856, it is in Illinois that the chief interest is to be found. The Illinois Central Railroad was finally started, and after building fourteen miles in 1852, to let in the Michigan Central have an entry into Chicago, had made a fair beginning in 1853, and had settled down to rapid work the following year. Building at once on five different parts of its route, in 1854, it had been able in 1855 nearly to complete its task. In 1856 there was but a single section left to be ironed before the work was done, extending up the very center of the state from Cairo to La Salle, and thence to Galena, [The Galena and Chicago Union Railroad, which had contemplated building to Galena, from Chicago, by way of Freeport, relinquished to the Illinois Central its rights west of Freeport. Later it realized its blunder in giving up its Mississippi terminus and constructed a branch from Aurora Junction, by way of Dixon, to Fulton. Flint, H. M., 275; Ninth Annual Report of the G., and C., U., Rr., (1856, June 4)] with a Chicago branch running nearly parallel for more than half its length. It was the longest and most imposing railway in the Northwest. It had extracted from the United States extensive aid in grants of public lands. But it traversed a country which had little use for the new Michigan Canal, and less for it. Finished on the eve of a commercial crisis, it never returned an income on its cost until the civil war, with troops and stores to be hauled, brought an accidental commerce to its rescue. [Ackerman, W. K., Historical Sketch of the Illinois Central Railroad, (Chicago, Fergus Printing Co., 1890), 68.] Had the railways of the Northwest been built only where they were needed they might well have been too few to hold in the trying days of the early sixties.

Railroad Map—1853

The Illinois Central is only the most striking of the northwest roads appearing on the maps after 1853. Less was anticipated from it than from other roads of shorter mileage. Across the states of Michigan and Wisconsin, and making what was nearly the northern frontier of railways, two lines were built from Detroit to Grand Haven, and from Milwaukee to La Crosse. The latter has the distinction of being perhaps the least savory of all the projects in what was not a squeamish decade. Taken together, the Detroit and Milwaukee, and the La Crosse and Milwaukee, as the roads were named, were expected to afford a short and popular route to Wisconsin and the new state of Minnesota. Both were done by the end of 1858.

Railroad Map—1854

South of Michigan and Wisconsin, the gaps were filling in. Through a consolidation of lines of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana, the Pittsburg, Ft. Wayne, and Chicago Railroad emerged as a system, entering Chicago over its own tracks in 1878. [Wilson, W. B., Hist of the Pennsylvania Rr. Co.] Crossing this road diagonally at Ft. Wayne, the nucleus of another system came down from Toledo in 1855. In 1856 this system, later known as the Wabash, was extended to Springfield, Illinois. It absorbed and extended the pioneer Northern Cross, and reached the Mississippi in 1859.

Railroad Map—1855

Roads running from east to west attracted, on the whole, more attention than those from north to south, and the interest that was centered on the Wabash and the Pittsburg, Ft. Wayne, and Chicago was watching also a road that left the Mississippi at East St. Louis, and was open to the Illinois Central junction at Sandoval in 1854. This was the Ohio and Mississippi, a mystic road that was to supplement the river and play into the hands of Cincinnati and St. Louis, its terminal points. Nowhere between the two did its right of way enter a city of importance save Vincennes, whose fame was legendary rather than commercial. East of Cincinnati, the Marietta and Cincinnati continued the course of this "American Central Railroad Line," [Smith, W. P., The Book of the Great Railway Celebrations of 1857, (New York, D. Appleton and Co., 1858), Introd. p. v.] to the mouth of the Muskingum, where it just failed of meeting the western end of an extension of the Baltimore and Ohio. The completion of the lines from St. Louis to Baltimore, in 1857, was the occasion of a noisy celebration on behalf of the three constituent roads and their friends. At Baltimore there was an elaborate banquet that began with green turtle soup and ended with twenty-five desserts including, seven kinds of ice cream, [Smith, W. P., 85, 86] while the Cincinnati Commercial saw in the event the hand of God, "The purposes for which the Creator erected the Allegheny barriers, against free communication between the seaboard and the Valley of the Mississippi, are accomplished. The populations on either side have been developed in their habits and pursuits up to the precise point, where necessity for comparative separation ceases, and the Divine wisdom that piled the mountains and scooped the valleys, has permitted their removal and filling up, that the middle way across the continent may be levelled and made straight, for the swifter marches of the armies that shall achieve the Industrial Millenium. [Quoted, in Smith, W. P., 104, from the issue of June 4, 1857.]

Railroad Map—1856

The first connecting railway of the Northwest was opened in 1848. Thereafter the movement of promotion gathered strength so that the next ten years saw the map transformed. Values changed as one city after another felt the stimulus of transportation. Chicago began to gain upon St. Louis, and though the latter labored for the building of a trans-Mississippi system of her own, [Million, J. W., State Aid to Railways in Missouri, (Chicago, The Univ. of Chicago Press, 1896)] she found little in it to replace her former dominion among the cities of the West. By 1858 the system of the Northwest was substantially complete. The panic came in 1857 to wreck the hopes of many, but the tracks were down. Few railways, that were not done before the crash, were finished in the next five years. As it stood upon the opening of the civil war, the railway system was the outcome of the ten seasons from 1848 to 1857.

Railroad Map—1857

Railroad Map—1858

Railroad Map—1859

Railroad Map—1860

For the first time in history, a great modern war was fought from 1861 to 1865. Never before had the function of the railway as a military agent been imagined or realized. The Northwest now was the possessor of a completed equipment, whose ultimate influences may as yet be only hinted at. The section was bound together, so that physical and intellectual unity were possible; the physical presence of the system provided an alternative for moving the crops, when war closed the outlet of the Mississippi, [Fite, E. D., Social and Industrial Conditions in the North during the Civil War, (New York, Macmillan, 1910), ch. 3] it facilitated the mobilization and distribution of instruments of war. Had the secession movement of 1850 grown into war, none of these factors would have been effective, and success for separation could hardly have been questioned. But in 1860 secession came too late. The Northwest was crossed and re-crossed by an intricate entanglement of tracks. [In its annual summary for Jan. 1, 1861, The American Railroad Journal gives the following totals:

Railways touched its boundary rivers every few miles from Pittsburg to La Crosse: Wellsville, Steubenville, Bellaire, Marietta, Ironton, Portsmouth, Cincinnati, Lawrenceburgh, Madison, Jeffersonville, New Albany, Evansville, Cairo, Illinoistown, Alton, Quincy, Warsaw, Burlington, Rock Island, Dunleith, Prairie du Chien, and La Crosse. In less than fifteen years modern life had ripened to maturity within the Old Northwest.

There are two reasons why entire accuracy cannot be attained in preparing schedules of annual railway construction. In the first place, the terminal points for the several years cannot always be determined. Statements that a line is in operation may mean that (a) a track is built, (b) that a construction train has run over it, (c) that a pleasure trip has been taken in the cars, (d) that a construction train carries occasional passengers and freight, or that the line (e) is operated regularly on a fixed schedule. In the following tables the last meaning has been regarded as the test, and followed wherever possible; but in a few cases there is uncertainty whether a given section should be placed in one year or the next. In the second place, distances between terminal points are only approximate. The railroads in their own reports occasionally give varying distances between the same points. Present distances cannot be trusted because nearly every road has straightened out and shortened its line since 1860. These tables rely chiefly on the distances given in time-tables and travelers' maps, but since the time-tables often give, on the same page, varying distances, editing has been necessary. It is believed that these are more nearly accurate than any other tables now in print, but they must be regarded as subject to changes in detail. In general, the totals are very nearly correct. Corporate names were changed so frequently that it has been impracticable to follow them in all cases.